Garden of Eden (23 page)

That’s what has happened to Lannie and Misty and probably to Dillon too. Everybody confused, nobody knowing what to do or how to do it. Mothers aren’t supposed to die in the midst of raising three small kids. Her absence disrupted something vital inside each of them. Mothers, she thinks, but what does she know about mothers? She has never been one herself. She shivers a little as she sees that she has left something out of her life that would have transformed it in ways she can’t quite imagine, but maybe would have been glad of.

Iris is afraid Misty is crying. She wants to go to her, put her arms around her, kiss her, offer to try to be her mother. But the knowledge
that it’s far too late, that Misty would push her away, makes her, finally, stand shakily and walk out of the room, back to the kitchen where Howard sits sipping his coffee.

“Find it?” he asks. Iris nods, unable to speak, sits again, more because her legs feel unsteady than because she wants to keep on talking to Howard. “She’s a good kid,” he says vaguely. “Keeps the place clean. Isn’t a bad cook, neither.” He’s talking about his daughter as if she were his pet or a good servant. Angrily she stands to go, saying a brusque goodbye. Her newfound sense of urgency propels her too, and her dismay at Misty’s accusation. At the open door she turns to Howard, whose face in the strong sunlight is suddenly clear. She sees a man whose once-crackling black hair has thinned and begun to grey, whose lined face, no longer handsome, bespeaks a kind of exhausted dissipation, whose opaque brown eyes have gone flat again, like a cat’s.

“Your brother’s dead,” she says. “Both of your brothers are dead,” her voice is tremulous with feeling. “You should take your children and go home. Your parents need you. What have you got here, working for some rich man?” A flash of surprise crosses Howard’s face and is replaced by a glimmer of something that might be respect before it shuts down, stony. Iris has stepped back out through the door, too agitated to notice, much less care about her audacity. She’s about to pull it shut, when she remembers why she has come here. In a voice that sounds more like her own, she says, “The moment I know anything I’ll phone Mary Ann and tell her to let you know too.” She hesitates, thinking about offering him money to help him relocate, but draws back in horror as she thinks of his reaction if she did. Instead, catching herself as much by surprise as she does Howard, she goes to him and bestows on his unresponsive shoulders an awkward hug before she turns away.

She pulls the door shut and steps outside into the sunshine, goes down the walk between pink and white petunias to her car and gets in. She sits for a second, filled with misery at not having seen Misty’s, Dillon’s, and Howard’s needs all those years ago, instead of only her own, and then Lannie’s. Finally, she starts the motor and, lifting her eyes, she realizes the man who’s walking toward her must surely be Dillon.

She watches curiously through the windshield. A carbon copy of Howard all right, but shorter, slimmer, with a delicacy of bone unlike Howard’s heaviness that she knows comes from his dead mother. He too is dressed in jeans, cowboy boots, a faded denim jacket over a denim shirt. Slowly she opens the door and gets out again.

“Dillon?”

“Aunt Iris?” he says, smiling, his hand out. Behind them, the mountains have lifted to hover mistily above the stables and barn. “Dad said you were coming. It’s great to see you.”

“It’s been a long time,” Iris says, and now she remembers that last, terrible visit when the cousins who’d raised them had brought both kids to visit Lannie on the farm. They’d been on their way to visit relatives in Manitoba. They’d refused even to stay overnight. And poor Lannie, hardly knowing what to say to her own brother and sister. And Dillon! Too big for his age, awkward and sullen — how has he transformed himself into this trim, apparently nice young man? “I’m glad to see you” is all she can think of to say.

“Yeah, well,” he says, awkward now, kicking the ground. Iris is aware that Howard will be out any moment — she doesn’t want to see him again.

“I’m trying to find Lannie,” she says quickly. “The last address anybody has is Toronto. I’m going there to look for her.”

“Oh?” he says, guarded now. His response surprises her.

“I met the man she was living with in Toronto,” she says. “He came out to the farm once, years ago.” Does he know? she wonders, why Tim came, why he stayed — those few awful days when Lannie — but no, she never even told Howard — why was that? She remembers vaguely that nobody was sure where he was — so Lannie’s brother has no way of knowing about her suicide attempt — unless Luke —

“The last time I heard from her was a phone call,” he says, but his manner has lost his easiness, it’s as if he’s ashamed, as if it’s his fault Lannie is lost. “It was a long time ago.” He clears his throat softly and looks away, off to the cabin.

She says with more certainty than she feels, “Don’t worry. I’ll find her.”

“She was worried about Misty, when Misty got married. She was only sixteen. I tried to talk her out of it,” he says, lowering his eyes, “but it was no use. He drank, ran around. Had this little place in the foothills. Misty wound up looking after the horses, feeding the cows. Dad went and brought her back.” He lifts his eyes to Iris’s, his mouth is twisted in a sour grin that reminds her of Howard. “Put the son of a bitch in the hospital.” She doesn’t have to ask if he means Howard or the husband.

“It’s good he was looking out for her,” she says lamely, although she’s thinking of his failure to look out for Lannie. She doesn’t understand why he would look after Misty and as good as discard his other daughter. When he doesn’t answer her, Iris says again, “I’ll phone you the minute I know anything.”

She gets back in the car and drives away down the clearly marked road which she sees now she should have used when she came in. She’s relieved that this meeting she dreaded is over. But something larger surfaces. These are the people who should care most about Lannie, who should have somehow saved her from whatever has happened to her. It’s not that we don’t care, she’s thinking, even Howard cares in a way, it’s just that — but she doesn’t know what has brought them all to this. Selfishness? Or just indifference?

She will have to search out Tim Quennell in Toronto to see what he can tell her. That means flying from Calgary. Or she could go home and in a couple of days, when she’s ready, drive to Regina and fly from there. But even though the thought of home tempts her strongly, she can only look longingly in that direction before she turns her car resolutely toward Calgary. No, she has come too far to turn back, and her small shiver of fear at the realization dissipates, replaced by a quickening of an emotion that just might be elation.

So lost in thought, she has driven miles before she begins to see the landscape again. She thinks then that there’s not as much ranchland as there used to be, and twice she’s surprised to see breaking ploughs at work in pastures. But what grassland there is looks in fairly good condition to her admittedly inexpert eye, and once again she notices
how beautiful it is compared to the fields of stubble or summerfallow, and also how much lusher than the fields of grass at home.

By the time she has relaxed again, she’s near Calgary. The closer she gets to the city, the wealthier people seem to be. She’s passing acreages, each with an elaborate new house on it and fenced with expensive board or stone or brick fences with two or three horses idly grazing behind them. The houses interest her for their architecture, although they all look as if they have nothing to do with the land they’re sitting on, might have been dropped down there from Mars. Acreages in general arouse chiefly her scorn, she who has always lived on far more land. Some of the owners have allowed their horses to graze the grass right down to its roots; a few of the acreages look worse even than the worst overgrazed ranchland. Obviously the owners don’t know the first thing about land, don’t realize the damage they’re doing. The farm girl in her is aware, too, that this is prime agricultural land taken out of use. And isn’t it selfish for one family to take up so much room for no other reason than their own pleasure? Barney and I may own far more, but we put it to good use, she thinks smugly, and repeats the platitude: we grow food on it to feed the hungry around the world.

Now she can see the city rising out of the plains before her, a long blue shadow that as she draws nearer gradually extends itself up and out, separating itself into overlapping, many-sized rectangular shapes, the even blue metamorphosing into faded browns and creams, greens, mauves, and greys. In the years since she first came here as a child, Calgary has more than doubled in size and taken on a level of sophistication that has made her lose interest in it. She doesn’t know what to do with so big a city, beyond shopping in it. It puzzles her where all these people rushing around on the jumble of freeways can be going, what it is they do with their lives.

Once, somewhere, high up in that confusion of shining towers, on a Christmas shopping expedition, she got lost and stumbled into a vast room noisy with water burbling through pipes and trickling into open troughs, and the hum of unseen machinery so powerful it made the floor quiver. It was the air in the room that attracted her: invitingly cool, moist, and fragrant. Thick cords of ivy climbed to the
ceiling, greenery cascaded downward, a carpet of flowers overflowed into the paths. Here was an artificial, glass-walled, tropical garden, while below was frigid winter, the stink and roar of traffic, the crowds of shoppers, the banks of pock-marked, blackened snow, the billowing clouds of ice fog like some filmmaker’s notion of hell. She was overcome by astonishment. What madness, what sheer, bald insanity — and yet, the perfumed air, the moist coolness, the stillness, such relief from the crowded, frantic mall. Although she’d tried on other trips, she’d never found the garden again.

She comes back to herself, realizing she has to make a decision immediately about where she’s going; it’s late afternoon, the rush hour will have begun. She has never driven in downtown traffic — Barney always did that — she has no idea where the airlines’ ticket offices are. She decides to stay on the road she’s on that she knows skirts the city, and go to the airport. She can buy her ticket there, and she knows from experience that there are hotels and motels nearby where she can spend the night.

Peering at signs, nervously changing lanes, then changing back again to the accompaniment of honking horns, having to circle around an extra time, she manages to find her way into the airport parkade. She parks, locks the car, and goes inside. She stands still, an island in the mass of people who part and stream around her while she searches for the counter where she can buy her ticket. After a couple of errors, she finds the right desk, buys a ticket on a morning flight to Toronto, goes out to her car, and drives away, stopping at the first hotel she comes to where she takes a room for the night.

It is small, stuffy, decorated in rusts, beiges, and browns that repel her, and in it she can hear the muted roar of planes taking off or landing. She’s nervous about tomorrow’s trip, apprehensive about finding Tim in a city she has never before been to. It occurs to her that she might try to phone him in Toronto; even if Lannie isn’t there, he might still be. Her hand is already on the phone to call information, but — No, she thinks. If I don’t reach him, I might not be able to go on, and if I don’t — possibilities flit through her mind and she withdraws her hand from the phone as if it’s hot. No, she doesn’t want to find out over the phone. Instead, she calls Ramona.

“I made it to Calgary,” she answers Ramona’s abrupt “Hello?” There’s a lot of thumping in the background, Cody and Ryan are roughhousing, she supposes. She tells Ramona where she has been, what she has found out, that she’s going to Toronto in the morning. “I’m a bit scared,” she confesses.

“Hey, kiddo,” Ramona says. “You can do it.” There’s an eruption of loud, adolescent male laughter in the background. Ramona muffles the phone with her hand, says something sharp, then comes back on the line and says, “Oh, that guy, the one you said wanted to buy the place? He was back. Wanted to know where you are. Said he wants to make an offer. Had the paperwork done and everything.” Iris’s heart gives a little thud and she shifts the phone to the other ear. “I said we were renting. Had an agreement. He made me kinda mad. He said, ‘Well, that’s no problem,’ like what we’d decided didn’t matter. Asked us how to get ahold of you.”

“Yes?” Iris asks, uneasy.

“Vance said he wasn’t sure, thought you were in Alberta. Didn’t know when you’d be back.”

“If he — or anybody else, for that matter — shows up asking about the place, tell them I said it isn’t for sale.” Her own new firmness surprises her a little, but in a pleasurable way, as she hangs up the receiver.

She’s not hungry, but she has a light supper in the hotel restaurant anyway, returns to her room, undresses, bathes, and gets into bed. Then she gets out again and reaches into her suitcase for her picture of Barney. He’s sitting at the plank table, a can of beer in one hand, his ball cap pushed back at Ramona’s command so there wouldn’t be a shadow on his face, and he’s grinning. He looks so at ease, and happy too, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. She presses the cold glass to her lips, then sets the picture on the bedtable.

Lying in the darkness, unable to fall asleep, she thinks about the land deal. If everybody else sells and she doesn’t, all her neighbours will be mad at her. After all, a lot of jobs would come with such a big enterprise, maybe she should sell. Then she thinks about what the jobs would be: secretaries in the offices, or housekeepers in the motels, or waitresses in the restaurants; for the men, feeding cattle in
a feedlot, shovelling manure, driving trucks, fixing machinery — it seems to her that giving up the freedom and beauty of your farm for shovelling manure or washing strangers’ dirty linen is a pretty poor trade-off.

And if she doesn’t sell? She could rent the farm to somebody else when Vance quits. Or seed it back to grass and she and Vance could ranch together. The thought makes her smile — that’ll be the day, she thinks.